Buff Briefs | CU’s ranking dips to 39th

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s ranking has slipped from 34th to 39th in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges issue in the category of “Best Public National Universities.”

The campus’s ranking has hovered in the mid 30s for the past five years. A decade ago, CU was ranked 26th.

Still, the university’s undergraduate engineering program came in at 18th place among public doctorate-granting universities, and its undergraduate business program came in at 22nd overall among public universities.

CU’s Colorado Springs campus was tied for seventh place among the top public regional universities in the West. CU’s downtown Denver campus was ranked 106th among the top national public universities.

Register your parties

The University of Colorado at Boulder and the city of Boulder have launched a second pilot program for responsible party-throwing.

The program is intended to help students become better informed about how to host responsible gatherings, while giving police and neighbors other options for resolving noise complaints. The program will run Friday and Saturday nights, Aug. 20 to Sept. 25.

The first pilot program ran from April 16 to May 8 and resulted in 14 registered parties. One party received a noise complaint, and no parties received a second complaint or required police response, according to Susan Stafford, director of Off-Campus Student Services.

“Our desire with this project is for students to understand that this is a tool to help them keep their parties safe and from being unnecessarily shut down,” says Allison Foley, CU Student Government vice president for external affairs.

Under the pilot program, CU students register a party in advance with Off-Campus Student Services. When hosts sign up, they are given educational materials outlining neighborhood concerns and their responsibilities as a party host. If a noise complaint is called in during a registered party, police dispatch will notify the student hosts by calling the phone number provided, and the host has a 20-minute
window to break up the party. If a second complaint is received, an
officer will be dispatched to the address and a citation will be issued
once a violation is confirmed.

Students can register in Off- Campus Student Services in University Memorial Center Room 313 Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Friday from 9 a.m. to noon.

Telescope project gets top billing

The National Research Council is giving top priority to an effort by CU and its partners to build a $110 million telescope in Chile for probing distant galaxies and stellar nurseries.

The project has been named as the top construction priority for mid-sized, ground-based telescopes in the coming decade.

The effort involves two major partners — Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology — and three other partners, including CU. Known as CCAT, the facility would be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile at about 18,500 feet above sea level and would be the largest, most precise and highest astronomical facility of its kind in the world, says Associate Professor Jason Glenn, who is spearheading the CU portion of the CCAT project.

The telescope was selected as part of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey produced by the National Research Council, the arm of the National Academy of Sciences that recommends priorities for the most important scientific and technical activities in astronomy and astrophysics every 10 years.

The Astro2010 committee is recommending that the National Science Foundation provide one-third of the cost of the project. CU will have to raise roughly $5.5 million in capital toward the cost of the facility as well as a contribution toward annual operating costs in the future, says Glenn.

Glenn’s lab at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy is working with CIT to build a state-ofthe-art camera for the telescope, using an array of 2,400 superconducting detectors.